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Performativity
We are now entering what might be called the second generation of the
performative in linguistic anthropology, one that promises to mimic its ear-
lier uptake, as language and gender scholars, inspired by gender theorist
Judith Butler's notion of "performativity," seek to ground her philosophical
claims in more localized, ethnographic accounts of diverse communities of
practice. Butler's argument that gender works as a performative, constitut-
ing the very act that it performs, is, as linguists such as Anna livia, Deborah
Cameron, Mary Bucholtz, and myself have pointed out, a promising idea
for discourse analysis, as it leads us away from sociolinguistic approaches
to identity that view the way we talk as directly indexing a prediscursive
self. To a poststructuralist like Butler, there is no prediscursive identity, as
even our understanding of biological sex is discursively produced. This per-
spective puts more weight on the speech event itself, requiring us to exam-
ine how speakers manipulate ideologies of feminine and masculine speech
in the ongoing production of gendered selves. Still, it must be stated that
Butler, like her poststructuralist predecessors, largely discounts the emergent
properties of gendered acts and the agency of the subjects that perform
them, focusing primarily on the repetitive nature of gender. For Butler, there
is no agency in the sense of a voluntarist subject, as actors are little more
than ventriloquists, iterating the gendered acts that have come before them.
The only way out of this performative trap is resignification, which if done
appropriately (and Butler points to the recent in-group reclaiming of the
word "queer" here as well as drag performance) can turn this iterability on
its ugly head and betray its constructed nature. It remains to be seen how
linguistic anthropologists will reconcile Butler's theory with an ethnographic
understanding of context and the diverse conceptualization of agency that
comes with it, but we can be certain that Austin's performative will continue
to enliven our field in unexpected ways well into the next century.
(See also act, agency, functions, gender, healing, humor, music, names, narrative,
orality, oratory, power, theater)
Bibliography
Austin, John L.
1962 How To Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs
1990 Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social
Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59-88.
Butler, Judith
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah
1997 The Language-Gender Interface: Challenging Co-optation. In Rethinking
Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. Victoria L. Bergvall,
Janet M. Bing, and Alice F. Freed, eds. Pp. 31-49. London: Longman.
Finnegan, Ruth
1969 How To Do Things with Words: Performative Utterances among the Limba
of Sierra Leone. Man 4:537-552.
Performativity 187
Foster, Michael
1989[1974] When Words Become Deeds: An Analysis of Three Iroquois Long-
house Speech Events. In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. 2nd ed.
Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, eds. Pp. 354-367. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hymes, Dell
1975 Breakthrough into Performance. In Folklore: Performance and Communi-
cation. D. Ben-Amos and K. S. Goldstein, eds. Pp. 1-74.
Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall
1997 "It's a Girl!" Bringing Performativity back to Linguistics. In Queerly
Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Anna Livia and Kira Hall, eds. Pp.
3-18. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle Z.
1982 The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory
in Philosophy. Language in Society 11:203-235.
Tambiah,S.J.
1979 A Performative Approach to Ritual. Proceedings of the British Academy 65.
London: Oxford University Press.
Turner, Victor
1984 Liminality and Performative Genres. In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle:
Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. J. J. MacAloon, ed. Pp.
19-41. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Department of Anthropology
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